Report: Brennan drafted apology to senators for CIA hacking

Last July, CIA Director John Brennan nearly apologized to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and ranking member Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in a letter for the CIA’s hacking into the computer network of committee staffers, according to a new report from VICE News.

VICE News, which had filed a joint Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA with Ryan Shapiro, an MIT researcher, obtained more than 300 pages of documents related to its pursuit of materials related to charges that the agency had spied on the Intelligence Committee and hacked into its network. The agency also withheld thousands of pages, citing “nearly every exemption under FOIA,” wrote reporter Jason Leopold.

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But for the CIA, there was just one problem: Apparently Brennan’s draft letter was not meant to be released.

“After VICE News received the documents, the CIA contacted us and said Brennan’s draft letter had been released by mistake. The agency asked that we refrain from posting it,” Leopold reported. “We declined the CIA’s request.”

In the draft letter to Chambliss dated July 28, 2014, which was obtained by VICE News and published Wednesday, Brennan was writing 10 days after a memo from CIA Inspector General David Buckley, whose office reported that the agency employees who broke into the Senate network to see if the committee had any CIA documents it wasn’t supposed to have, may have broken federal laws.

“I recently received a briefing on the IG’s findings, and want to inform you that the investigation found support for your concern that CIA staff had improperly accessed the SSCI shared drive on the RDINet when conducting a limited search for CIA privileged documents,” Brennan wrote, according to the document.

“In particular, the OIG judged that Agency officers’ access to the SSCI shared drive was inconsistent with the common understanding reached in 2009 between the Committee and the Agency regarding access to RDINet. Consequently, I apologize for the actions of CIA officers,” he added, expressing a commitment to fix “the shortcomings that this report has revealed.”

According to the report, however, Brennan did not sign or send the letter. The letter that Brennan ultimately sent did not make any reference to an apology.

Brennan did apologize to Feinstein and Chambliss during a briefing about the OIG’s report. Members of the committee told VICE that was unacceptable, however, because it was not part of a written record. According to the report, committee members told reporters that Brennan should have apologized to them as well and to the staffers implicated by the CIA.